Amid the Disarray, a Phenomenon

The Republican race remained in disarray. The harder the candidates ran, the weaker they looked. The less the noncandidates ran, the better they looked. Part of the problem was the defeatism that seems to pervade the party about the possibility of beating President Johnson in November. Part, as Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller have discovered, was the mere matter of overexposure.

Last week Goldwater handily won the Illinois presidential primary with 512,616 votes against 205,690 for his only announced opponent, Maine's Senator Margaret Chase Smith. In so doing, he probably picked up the great bulk of Illinois' 58 convention delegate votes, although the primary is not binding. Yet Barry's win impressed hardly anyone, if only because Illinois had figured to be a real Goldwater stronghold and he got only a bit more than 50% of the total G.O.P. primary vote. This was mostly due to a rash of write-ins, including 52,322 for Henry Cabot Lodge and 24,710 for Richard Nixon. Even more discouraging, more than 200,000 Republicans who voted for a gubernatorial candidate did not bother about the presidential primary.

"Getting the Delegates." Afterward, Goldwater still sounded confident, claimed about 150 delegates already committed to him at the July convention in San Francisco. A realistic break down would, in fact, include: Arizona 16, Georgia 18, Kansas 12, Louisiana 16, North Carolina 25, Oklahoma 22, South Carolina 16, Tennessee 4, and Illinois 48, for a total of 177. Said Goldwater: "The polls all talk about Lodge, but everybody overlooks the fact that I'm getting the delegates."

What about the other Republican possibilities? New York's Governor Rockefeller finally rammed a liquor-law reform bill through his state legislature. Since the vital votes came from the Bronx machine headed by aging Democratic Boss Charles Buckley, the victory was hardly one to enhance Rocky's G.O.P. prestige. After the vote he sighed: "Now I'm free to return to the national scene." He left almost immediately for Oregon.

Getting the Votes. Richard Nixon returned to the U.S. after a three-week business trip to the Far East, made three speeches. The last one was in Washington, before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Clearly not excluding Cabot Lodge from his appraisal, Nixon said: "Confidence in and respect for American leadership in Southeast Asia is at its lowest point since Pearl Harbor." But few Republicans seemed to be scrambling--so far, at least--to hitch themselves to Nixon's star. And Pennsylvania's Governor William Scranton was still insisting that he really, really wanted no part of the presidential nomination.

All that pretty much leaves the man in Saigon--Ambassador Lodge. His chances were looking up in Oregon (see following story), and his popularity elsewhere was indicated by a Gallup Poll that last week matched him against Nixon, found that 57% favored Lodge, 36% Nixon, with 7% undecided. Because many Republican professionals are less than fond of him, and because of his identification with the stalemated war in South Viet Nam, Lodge may not last the full course. But so far, he is the G.O.P. phenomenon of 1964.

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